Minor problem calling BJP a national party

As the results poured in on Friday evening, BJP supporters were quick to point out that the party’s wins were spread across the length and breadth of the country, from Ladakh in the north to Kanyakumari in the south and from Kachchh in the west to Arunachal Pradesh in the east. It might seem like making much of a coincidence that the BJP won in these four seats, but there is actually much more to it.

Through the period of the late-nineties and early noughties, the Congress would be at pains to point out that while the BJP may have won more seats in 1998 and 1999, it still was behind the Congress in vote share and it was geographically much more restricted. Most of the south, parts of the east like West Bengal, and most of the northeast, they would correctly point out, were regions where the BJP was virtually non-existent . This election has changed that situation dramatically. The BJP has, of course, won a vote share significantly higher than the Congress — 31% to 19.3% — but that’s only a part of the story. The far more surprising development is that in several of the states where the party hardly existed, it has now registered a significant presence. In many cases, it has upstaged the Congress in vote share too.

In Andaman & Nicobar, for instance, the BJP has won, just as it did in 2009. In Arunachal Pradesh, it not only has a seat but a higher vote share than the Congress. The same is now true of Assam, where the BJP has both more seats and votes than the Congress. In Manipur, the party’s vote share is now in double digits at 11.9%, and in Meghalaya it won 8.9% of the votes. Incidentally, the BJP’s vote share in these two states is higher than its vote in Punjab, where nobody would suggest it has no presence.

Mizoram and Nagaland still remain no-go zones for the BJP as does Sikkim, but for whatever it’s worth, the party’s 2.4% share in Pawan Chamling’s fortress is a tad higher than the Congress’ 2.3%. In Tripura, the Congress with 15.2% remains well ahead of the BJP’s 5.7%. Taken all-in-all, the northeast is no longer an area in which the Congress can afford to scoff at the BJP as an also-ran.

In the south, the BJP’s rise in Karnataka is now an old story, but Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala have in the past proved hard nuts for it to crack. That may be changing now. In undivided Andhra Pradesh, the BJP’s vote share of 8.6% in this election is only a little lower than the Congress’ 11.6%. More significantly, in what will soon be Seemandhra, it has a share of 7.3%, much higher than the Congress’s 2.9%.

In Tamil Nadu, too, the BJP’s vote share of 5.5%, while being very low, has trumped the Congress vote of 4.3%. Among the southern states, therefore, it’s only in Kerala that the Congress can boast of a vote share that’s significantly higher than the BJP’s. But even here, a 10.3% share of the state’s votes and a close second finish in Thiruvananthapuram means the BJP can no longer be written off as a party of no consequence.

All of this suggests indisputably that the BJP has arrived — at least in these elections — as a national party. In fact, it can go further and claim without sounding outlandish that it is the national party today, at least statistically.

There is, however, one important way in which the party’s claim to being truly national remains questionable — the fact that its rise has happened with a near total exclusion of minorities. That it fielded hardly any Muslim candidates and doesn’t have a single MP from the community among its 282 MPs is now well-known and much-discussed. But that’s not all. As far as can be made out from the names of its newly-elected MPs, only SS Ahulwalia from Darjeeling (a Sikh) and Thupstan Chhewang from Ladakh are members of minority communities.

Is this near absence of non-Hindus in a list of 282 MPs from the length and breadth of the country accidental? Is it just a coincidence that the BJP gets a mere 0.4% of the vote in Lakshadweep, which has a population consisting almost entirely of Muslims, and that it does not contest from Mizoram and Nagaland — both Christian-majority states?

It is rather more plausible that the party’s expansion owes a lot to polarizing campaigns it undertook, as in Assam and West Bengal, in the course of these elections. That strategy, of course, cannot but be exclusionist. What’s true is the BJP has grown way beyond its traditional Hindu upper caste and Hindi heartland base, both socially and geographically. But it still seems to have no room in the tent for minorities. And that puts a big question mark, both over its status as a truly national party and the implications of its rise.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Shankar Raghuraman, Senior Editor with The Times of India, has spent the last 23 years meandering from being a reluctant business journalist to an eager number-cruncher with the Times Insight Group. Along the way, he has written and held passionate views on politics, sports and just about everything else. He would welcome favourable comments as an addition to an already unduly high self-esteem, but fools will also be suffered.

Shankar Raghuraman, Senior Editor with The Times of India, has spent the last 23 years meandering from being a reluctant business journalist to an eager num. . .